It's honestly getting hard for me to justify having a more powerful PC. I have a Threadripper build (3960x) with a 2080 Super, along with 2x 3.5" drives, 2x SATA SSDs, and 3x NVMe drives. The thing draws like 200-250W at idle. Closer to 400-500W under moderate gaming. I'm looking at upgrading to a 4090 since gaming at 4K is pretty "meh" on a 2080. The embargo lifted today and I've been skimming the review: it looks like these cards will draw 500W continuous _by themselves._ So I'd be looking at potentially 700W+ from the wall.

My A/C failed this year and I became acutely aware of just how much heat my current workstation is pumping into my room. Even with the A/C running my room is about 5-10degF hotter than the rest of the house. So for me I'm starting to run into thermal constraints; there's also the noise factor. All my PCIe bandwidth comes at a hefty price: which is that the sTRX4 chipset is actively cooled with a pathetically tiny fan.

Perhaps it's just part of being older and wiser, but I'm starting to be more enthused about the process/efficiency refinements rather than the generational performance leaps. I'm actually thinking about "downsizing" significantly with my 2024-rig. (The threadripper is still a beast though, it will probably get racked in a 4U case as my next home server.)

Who knows though, maybe I'll figure out how to reject the heat outside my domicile and go balls to the wall with a 64c/128t monster. I guess it all depends on if AMD decides to release another HEDT chipset by 2024.